


The Book Doesn't Lie (But Stan Does)

by embulalia



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family Issues, Gen, I don't have everything planned out you see, Journal 3, Mistaken Identity, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, WIP, but as of now it'll be fairly light fair, probably but I'm not absolutely certain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 12:38:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7640446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embulalia/pseuds/embulalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While wandering in the woods around his strange great uncle's property, Dipper Pines stumbles upon a strange, old book. The strangest thing about the entire situation is the apparent connection between the book and his relative.</p>
<p>An AU in which Stanford Pines doesn't go to great lengths to hide his face throughout Journal 3. It makes Dipper's quest to discover the author much shorter, and much more complicated. Contains spoilers for Journal 3!</p>
<p>(hiatus until blacklight journal comes out!!!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Book Doesn't Lie (But Stan Does)

When Dipper found the book, it wasn’t in very good shape. The leather binding was torn in several places, it wore a veil of cobwebs and dust, and pages were torn, dog eared, and even burned. Its musk was so intense that just holding the thing made his eyes water from revulsion. The striking, golden insignia on the front was scratched and weathered, but it still glittered slightly when the sun hit the aluminum. A six fingered hand, poised for a high five (a high six?), with the number 3 painted on the palm. 

It was weird enough on its own, even without the fact that it was hidden in a trapdoor underground that was activated by an old HAM radio hidden inside a metal tree trunk. And that was saying a lot.

But Dipper was yearning for some adventure, for something more fulfilling than helping his weird, vaguely smelly great uncle scam money out of clueless tourists. If a gross, musty old book that hadn’t seen the light of day in lord knows how long would be his source, then so be it. 

He tucked the book inside of his vest, a manoeuvre he’d picked up from an action movie and was struggling to master. He couldn’t figure out how those heroes managed to keep their items from falling out of their coats; whenever he tried, he wound up waddling around with his arms pinned to his sides, looking nowhere near as cool as they managed to. But it kept things hidden, and something about the multiple safeguards taken to keep this thing unfound made Dipper think he should do his best to keep it that way. So, he waddled his way back through the woods.

Luckily for him, sneaking back inside wasn’t too difficult. Stan’s tour group was admiring that weird rock he was displaying on a stand outside the shack, where it scowled at everyone with its lumpy face. Well, it wasn’t an actual face, of course. It just looked like a face. In all honesty though, Dipper thought it just looked really ugly.

He could hear Stan shouting frustratedly at his dense tour group, which appeared to be stubbornly ignoring his attempts at explaining the “curious” nature of the insignificant rock. The old man’s weird voice never sounded threatening when he yelled, just mildly ridiculous. He seemed to be the type of geezer who tried to be threatening, but just wound up funny instead. Dipper doubted he could really hurt anything, even if he did snap and throw some punches at his comically unintelligent audience. 

As unthreatening as Stan’s shouting was, it kept him busy, which cleared the way for Dipper’s covert book-smuggling operations. He snuck into the shack without event, relieved to find only Wendy at the counter inside.

“Sup, Dipper?” she asked lazily, reclining in her seat.

“Nothing!” Dipper yelped, wincing a little at how conspicuous it sounded. Wendy gave him a perplexed look, snickered, and shook her head.

“Whatever you say,” she said, kicking her feet up onto the counter. A few clumps of dirt detached from the bottom of her boots, dirtying the scuffed surface. Dipper watched her admiringly for just a moment too long before shaking his head and scurrying to the stairs. 

When his bedroom door was finally closed behind him, he let out a relieved sigh and finally relaxed his arm. Pinning the book against his side was surprisingly strenuous; one day, he’d have to do some proper research into how people in the movies pulled off hiding things in their jackets. It’d have to wait, though: he was already well set up with reading materials. 

He hurried directly to his bed (a stripped mattress propped up on a meagre excuse for a bed frame) and flopped down on it, a little cloud of dust poofing into the air around him. He coughed on it, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell. It was quite clear that the attic room didn’t get much use.

Despite the fact that he had more or less bumbled into it blindly, picked it up, and walked it home without incident, Dipper couldn’t help but feel quite accomplished to be holding the old, damaged book in his grubby hands. Something about the fact that it was concealed underground with a trapdoor mechanism hidden within a fake tree really gave off the idea that the thing hadn’t been seen in quite some time. And now HE had it. Of all people, Dipper Pines, the clumsy and sweaty dork Dipper Pines, had found it. Giddiness swelled in his heart at the very thought that he had been the one to unearth the torn book. 

It had been close to three minutes, and he still hadn’t opened the thing. Perhaps it was a little silly to be so excited about a book he hadn’t even looked inside yet. 

He muttered to himself, “Alright, let’s do this…” and lifted the leather cover.

Another cloud of dust burst into his face, and he again doubled over coughing. It was beginning to feel like he wouldn’t escape the summer without developing some sort of lung condition. If that would be the most exciting thing to happen, then it would be a disappointing summer indeed.

The inside of the book was just as blatant about its age and neglect as the binding. The pages were creased, crinkled, yellowed with age, blots of fluid peppering them as if the thing had been out in the rain. Taped to the inside cover was a torn sheet of letterhead, with the words “Property of” written in loopy script. The name was, unfortunately, on the piece that had been torn off. Examining the rip made it difficult to say whether that had been intentional or not, but something made Dipper think that it was no accident. Something about the fact that only the top, intact corners were taped, about the angle that deliberately excised every trace of the words that had once been there, about the fact that the remaining letterhead was so tidy in comparison to the weathered pages around it. Excitement stirred in Dipper’s belly. An old, concealed tome bearing a mysterious symbol with the name torn out. It was like he was in a classic mystery story.

He still hadn’t looked properly inside, and he was already starting to feel his heart fluttering. 

“Volume 3,” the second page declared in the same fancy, elegant handwriting. “Ad astra per aspera.” 

The door burst open, and Dipper almost threw the book.

“Was that latin?” Mabel chirped as she hopped into the room, kicking her shoes off. “I didn’t know you knew latin, Dipper!”

“I don’t,” Dipper said, pulling his knees up to shield the front of the book from her view. 

“Whatcha reading?” she asked curiously, coming over to his bed and leaning over to sneak a peek. He tugged it against his chest on instinct.

“Nothing, nothing,” Dipper said, wincing when his voice sounded far too guilty. Mabel rolled her eyes.

“Dipper, I’m not blind. I can see the book. The thing’s pretty big, you know,” she scolded. Dipper hesitated, then slowly uncoiled, letting her take a look at the ripped leather. She snatched it from his hands. “Oh wow, this thing’s ANCIENT,” she gasped.

“Yeah, so be careful with it!” Dipper yelped. A loose page came free from the tattered book, fluttering to the wooden floor. Dipper hopped off his bed and scooped it up. “Can I have it back, please? I don’t want it getting any more damaged than it already is.”

Mabel handed it back then poked his shoulder. “What, you think I’ll hurt it?”

“I think you won’t be gentle enough with it,” he replied, carefully tucking the loose page back with the rest. He hoped it would land in the right place.

“So where’d you find this thing?” Mabel asked, plopping down on her own bed and bouncing on it. “I didn’t think you’d be able to go all the way to the library and back already, unless you left, like, before breakfast or something.”

“Actually, I found it in the woods,” Dipper said, looking from his sister back to the old book. 

“In the woods? Really?” Mabel asked curiously, “I guess that explains why it’s so messed up!”

“Yeah,” Dipper nodded, turning to the page he had been on before she had turned up. The next one is labelled with the date June 18. “I don’t know how old it is, but it smells… uh… really old. Really, really old.” 

“That’s pretty cool,” she said, swinging her legs hard enough to thump her feet against the side of her bed. It was just as neglected as Dipper’s, but the bright pink blanket gave it the false appearance of youth. He could tell she was losing interest. Dipper couldn’t possibly imagine anything more fascinating than the mysterious book, but his sister found entertainment in strange places. 

Dipper began to read the first entry aloud, even though Mabel wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention anymore. He had enough interest in the book for the both of them. He was immediately entranced by the words of the unnamed author and their passion for the oddities of the town. They wrote about seeking a so called “Unified Theory of Weirdness” to explain why the town was such a hub for strangeness, and the first few pages made it very clear exactly what sort of “weird” the author had in mind. Floating eyeballs, gnomes, cursed doors? They were the kinds of things Dipper was used to seeing in shows like Triplet Peaks and The New Moon Zone: vaguely unsettling magical stories about monsters and the troubling nature of the human mind. Dipper would be prone to discredit the ramblings if it weren’t for the fact that torn, crumpled photographs of the things the author had seen were taped in place, some of them crossed out in black and others labelled with extra commentary. It was incredible.

Dipper was getting the feeling that developing asthma may not be the most interesting thing that would happen to him that summer after all.

Three entries deep, Dipper was already entranced. He wanted to bury himself in the book, study every little aspect of the illustrations, memorize every strange symbol and doodle scrawled in the stained margins. He spent a long time on each page, making sure he had absorbed every detail he could before reluctantly moving on. It took him close to half an hour to reach the fourth entry and find it not another documentation of the paranormal, but the “about the author” section he had been hoping for.

“Myself,” read the title in the loopy, appealing writing Dipper was beginning to consider learning to replicate. A drawing of a shrunken head in the upper right corner drew Dipper’s eye instantly, but he tore his attention away to pay proper attention to the entry itself. A frankly impressive drawing of a young man with folded arms was on the left page. He wore thick glasses and a rumpled shirt with the collar creased awkwardly. He was smiling casually, his dark hair sticking up in messy, loose curls. He had a very big, round nose that inexplicably made Dipper think of the Muppets. He looked tired, as if he had spent a lot more time researching and writing than he had sleeping. His face was very, very square. 

And something about him was very familiar.

Dipper peered down at the image, squinting his eyes in the hopes of making something out of it. The sense of recognition ran very deep, to the point that he was quite certain he had seen the face somewhere before. He thought hard about various figures he had seen in textbooks, wondering if the author’s work had been published had reached some sort of academic fame. Then, he thought about the various web pages he had stumbled across on his various forays through the internet while looking up ghost stories and facts about space. The ghost story community would be a perfect place to find a man like the author, but he couldn’t think of any writers who fit the image from those communities either. 

Reluctantly, Dipper turned his attention to the actual text around the image. The author wrote about himself like he had any other specimen, which struck Dipper as odd. The autobiographical entry shouldn’t feel like the study on gnomes, should it? 

The author had trouble at school, but not in the academic sense so much as the social sense; he appeared to be affronted by bullies regularly, and only made it through without permanent damage thanks to the presence of his unnamed brother. Dipper was glad to know that he had someone to help him out; he was already beginning to feel rather attached to the author, and didn’t like the idea of him being beaten down in such a way. The man was too brilliant and talented for that, surely! 

He called himself strange, just like he called floating eyeballs and cursed doors strange. It felt like a bit of an overreaction to a few extra fingers, but with the way the other kids treated him, Dipper could understand why. He even sympathized in a way, as he himself was not exactly a stranger to that sort of harsh treatment. As he read about the author’s struggles with his birth defect, Dipper found himself running his hand through his hair, habitually making sure it covered his forehead. He stopped when he noticed. 

He felt himself liking the author even more. 

“Hey, kid!” A rough yell came from downstairs, bouncing around the triangular shack. 

Dipper jumped clear out of his skin, gripping the old book tightly in a defensive panic. He looked around quickly; Mabel was no longer in the room with him. When had she left? He had been so absorbed in reading that he hadn’t noticed. What had distracted him again? 

“Kid! You alive?!” Oh right, the yelling.

“Y-Yeah!” Dipper called back, marking his place with the little monocle on a golden ribbon that was attached to the book’s spine. He closed it delicately and tucked it inside his pillowcase. Then, he went to the door and leaned down the stairs. “What’s going on?”

“Food!” came the rather disinterested sounding response.

Dipper’s stomach growled at the mention of a meal. He hadn’t noticed that he was hungry, either. The book had really kept him entranced! It was exciting to feel so utterly absorbed by something; he couldn’t remember the last time he was so interested in anything, really. Maybe the summer would turn out better than he ever could have imagined.

 

 

It took Dipper days to make more than a small dent in the journal with the rate at which he read, but even what he knew from his short time with the book had already come in handy. Mabel had gotten herself entangled in an il-fated romance with what he thought would be a zombie, but instead turned out to be a kingdom of gnomes. The gnome society was far more expansive and complicated than the entry on them made it sound; Dipper wondered if that was because the author hadn’t included the information or if he didn’t know. The idea that he hadn’t known was thrilling; it meant that there was still so much left to discover about the town. And, even though the author was gone, Dipper had found his work and vowed to keep it going. 

He practiced his handwriting for hours and hours before he could finally bring himself to write his own entry in the empty pages at the back of the book in blue pen—pen, not even pencil! Permanent ink and everything! Although, he found himself regretting that decision a little bit with how much crossing out and rewriting he was doing. Frankly, he wasn’t sure that graphite would show up on the dark, stained paper, so he was stuck with ink. He pretended to be excited about it; if he didn’t, he’d be too worried about messing up to ever write anything at all. 

His attentions were very precisely placed. His primary interest was continuing the author’s research. Finding the book had been the greatest thing to ever happen to Dipper; the author spoke to him like no one else ever had. As long as the man was missing, Dipper felt like he owed it to him to keep his work alive. Even though he had never met the man. His secondary (but still utterly crucial!) interest was on figuring out who the author was. Dipper flipped back to his autobiographical page often, studying the portrait of the mysterious man with deep fascination. It was so familiar, so very familiar, but he couldn’t figure out why. Something about the man’s face filled Dipper with a recognition reminiscent of deja vu; he knew with absolute certainty that he had seen the man before. He just… couldn’t figure out when. Or where. It drove him crazy.

Mabel was only tacitly interested in the book. Her mind was glued to one thing and one thing only: boys. That also drove Dipper crazy, but he could almost ignore it if he focused on the book and the mysteries with enough intensity. That was proving to be quite easy; some new, wild adventure jumped out of nowhere every few days. Dipper loved it; it was like watching the book come to life. Gnomes, ghosts, giant robots, telepathic creeps? Well, a lot of that wasn’t actually IN the book (at least, it wasn’t before Dipper put it there!), but it was the same kind of weird thing that the author loved. Dipper really felt like he was continuing a legacy. And the book didn’t even smell so bad anymore! It had stopped spewing dust a while ago too! Maybe asthma wouldn’t be one of Dipper’s souvenirs from everything after all. 

He was achieving his primary goal with amazing success, but the secondary goal was a continuous dead end. The author drew himself reasonably often, illustrating scenes of his travels with his big-nosed assistant, F. And the more times Dipper found himself face to face with the author’s self portraits, the more Dipper was certain he knew the face from somewhere. But for the life of him, he couldn’t place it. It was agonizing.

It was looking like this particular day was going to be a relaxed one, without anything supernatural springing out of nowhere at him. Dipper had been wanting for a day off; it turned out that chasing monsters was exhausting work. He understood why the author looked so tired! 

But even if it was a day off from the supernatural, Dipper wouldn’t be able to completely abandon his journal-related activities. No, a break from running around meant he could sit down at the scuffed table and put some real thought into who the author was. He had practically memorized the man’s face by now, but he still had no real idea of what name fit it. So, out of sheer desperation, Dipper had gotten out a sheet of scrap paper and started writing down a list of names: the names of every man he could possibly think of. He hoped that eventually, he would think of the right one, and his mind would fit the pieces together. 

The list was, predictably, getting to be quite long.

“Hey kid,” said a gravelly voice from behind Dipper, who jumped at the unexpected sound. That earned him a little scoff. “You’re really jumpy, you know.”

“I was focused on something,” Dipper says with a touch of defensiveness. He had decided very early on that his conman great uncle could not know about the book he had found; who knew what he might do with it. It was safely hidden in his pillowcase in the attic. Stan never went up there. 

“Don’t let me stop you,” Stan said with a casual shrug, crossing the kitchen and getting down a bowl. He filled it with cereal and milk, then stood beside Dipper, chewing his food loudly. “What’re you up to?”

“I’m just… writing something,” Dipper said.

“Yeah, I figured that much out,” Stan snorted. He wiped milk from his mouth on the back of his hand. “I was more askin’ about what it was.” He leaned over to peer at the page, squinting. Dipper wanted to lean forward and shield his work, but that would make him appear a lot more suspicious than he already was. “That’s a lot of names. You making a hit list or something?”

“What? A hit list? No, of course not!” Dipper said, emphatically shaking his head. He often wondered whether his great uncle should be in jail instead of looking after him and his sister. 

“Don’t tell me it’s a list of all your friends,” Stan scoffed. Then, he coughed hard, nearly dropping the bowl of cereal in his hand. After a few moments of the uncomfortable hacking, he spat out a chewed up mouthful of food. Dipper grimaced. “Phew, that would’ve been an embarrassing way to go!” he laughed, “Choking on raisin bran! I can just imagine the headlines. And they are unimpressive, let me tell you.” He clapped a hand on Dipper’s shoulder. Dipper’s gaze and thoughts were focused on the chewed lump of bran on the kitchen floor and how determined he was to not step on it. 

“Uh huh, yeah,” he agreed mindlessly. 

Stan frowned. “Kid, you’ve been really spacey lately. Is somethin’ going on? Is there someone I need to beat up?”

“No, why would I want that?” Dipper asked incredulously, finally looking away from the floor and up at his great uncle’s face.

And it suddenly hit him.

That square jaw, those tired eyes, the big nose… 

His great uncle, the clueless con man who had outright dismissed every mention Dipper and Mabel had ever made of things supernatural… His great uncle, Stan Pines, was the author of the journals.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a silly little side project that I intend to fiddle with; I don't have all of the details past a certain point figured out, but I do know a lot of the basic beats I want to hit on. Blah blah blah basically nothing too serious here. Apologies to fellow lovers of angst; I shall return to that shortly. I just liked this idea, haha. Chapter cap is approximate, and I might change the title at some point.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! Please hold any plot-hole related questions until the next chapter; there's a good chance they'll be addressed (yes, I'm mainly referring to the finger thing).


End file.
